If you're looking for Lance Lynn to say something informative and enlightening, you won't get it after a disappointing start.
Lynn trafficked in terseness following another White Sox loss to open the series in Toronto on Monday, like here:
Lynn has faced these command struggles before. He walked 154 batters across 2017 and '18 and led the league in wild pitches in '19. Grifol is confident his pitcher will smooth the mechanics, find the zone, and get back on track. According to Lynn, the solution is quite simple:
"Throw more strikes," he said.
And this seems like a longer answer, until realizing he was asked to elaborate in the middle of his response.
‘‘Two-out walk, pretty much it,’’ Lynn said afterward. ‘‘Gave up four because of it. They’ll haunt you; they’ll haunt you bad. Tonight it happened.’’
The day after such a start, and with a former ballplayer doing the interviewing, Lynn was willing to answer at length. You'll have to decide whether that's a good thing.
Lynn appeared on A.J. Pierzynski's YouTube show, and Pierzynski spoke as, for and to a White Sox fan when he asked Lynn bluntly, "What the f--- is going on?"
For those that can't watch the video, a transcript of Lynn's answer:
"To be honest with you, we are in the midst of everybody learning a whole new way of going about things in this organization, coaching staff and everything, and guys are taking the right steps. The problem is it hasn't clicked. We've been in games against good teams and just didn't finish them, whether it's not scoring at the end, losing in extras, things like that. The process, the way of going about things, preparing and all that, are at a whole new level here, and that's where we're at right now. We got guys that are literally trying all new things and learning on the fly, things all the way around."
Lynn then went on to reference the poor performances, taking responsibility for his part, before circling back to "all the new concepts."
Credit Pierzynski for maintaining his skepticism, saying that Lynn's response scared him: "New concepts? What are the new concepts, scoring more runs than the other team?" Lynn responded by citing an entirely new coaching staff on the hitting side, and that said concepts hadn't yet translated to winning baseball.
The rest of Lynn's interview was fine/entertaining, particularly his disregard for sweepers and the pitch clock, although when Pierzynski asked him another blunt question ("Who's the leader?"), Lynn didn't have a direct answer for him, either.
But raising the subject of preparation is the stunner, just during Pedro Grifol's introductory media conference, Rick Hahn went out of his way to reference how much the White Sox's pregame planning was going to shift:
“We spent a lot of time with Pedro talking through improvements to our pregame planning, something that he was heavily involved in in the past, as well as how we prepare from an offensive standpoint to get the most out of the traits of the players on the roster,” Hahn said. “How we go about our business in that area in particular I think you’re going to see a lot different from what we had in the past.”
Four weeks into the regular season, the White Sox are 7-16, and one of their most prominent veterans says the White Sox are still getting used to what the new coaching staff is doing, and those struggles just happen to resemble everything the White Sox have been doing wrong for years. Grifol just got here, and even he's tired of referencing the team's piss-poor plate discipline.
By the end of Monday’s postgame session, Grifol lamented that he was repeating himself about the urgency of the Sox plate discipline and swing decision issues.
“We’ve talked about this before,” Grifol said. “Going from the amount of chases that we are having right now to no chasing, it’s not going to be an overnight thing. However, it can improve daily. That’s what we’re expecting. That’s what they’re expecting. That’s the work that’s being done. So I’m looking for improvements. It’s going to happen.”
That refrain -- "It's going to happen" -- is a crutch for everybody, but what's awesome about being a White Sox fan right now is that there's no reason to take anybody's word for anything. Grifol's new to managing and new to the White Sox, and players spend their entire careers trying to ignore track records, odds, probabilities that work against them.
And then there's the front office.
Daryl Van Schouwen got a hold of Kenny Williams, who says he says he's "not in a good place" and "not so pleasant to be around right now," which, whatever, who cares. But there was one sentence that jumped out to me, because it included the same word Hahn used after last season, and the particular context of the White Sox front office continues to pervert the definition:
Williams said he wasn’t putting Hahn or anyone else in the front office on notice by saying changes would have to be made if the Sox don’t win.
“No, that’s ultimately ownership call,” Williams said. “I’m talking about the realities of sports. When you do not accomplish the goal at hand, and you’ve been given the opportunities we’ve been fortunate to be given to try to rebuild this thing, to tear it down and rebuild it — and we were on the right track and right now the train is off the rails a little bit — it would be naïve of me to think if things don’t correct themselves that we wouldn’t be looked at as well. As it should be.
“Accountability around here is not a problem.”
That's a fascinating sentence, because the way he meant it and the way it's actually true are two completely different things.
I'm sure Williams intended to express that the White Sox have high expectations and are willing to take hard looks and make tough calls when things go wrong. But given that the White Sox haven't accomplished anything meaningful since 2005 and failures have been met with shrugs and promotions, it turns out that accountability is not a problem for White Sox executives because accountability simply doesn't exist.
It's like when Hahn said last October that questioning the entrenchment of the front office was "a fair question given pro sports and given the accountability we all want to have," only to realize that most people would prefer zero accountability if they could still maintain their titles and salaries, and Hahn happens to be living that dream.
And if that's not enough, this all dropped right after the Pirates handed Bryan Reynolds an eight-year, $106 million contract extension, leaving the Athletics, Royals and White Sox as the last teams that haven't been willing to commit nine figures to any player. Not only do the Pirates have the White Sox's inverse record at 16-7, but now Jerry Reinsdorf is making Bob Nutting look like George Steinbrenner.
These are merely the most recent advancements in the ongoing progression of "late-stage White Sox," which is my unified theory of the way Reinsdorf's general neglect led to a pervasive rot that can't be reversed by the current leadership.
Hahn hired Grifol under the assumption that the White Sox weren't prepared, and now Lynn is saying the White Sox are flailing because they're struggling with preparation, which can only mean that the talent is the problem.
Here's a reminder that the White Sox are at the height of their alleged contention window and they're still grappling with fundamental questions like "Are our players any good?" and "What are we telling them?" What does that say to you? And will Reinsdorf ever care to hear it?
